Currency, Zamyn's 2008-09 programme, addresses how the activities of the leading corporations from the financial markets are impacting cultures.

The programme will comprise a series of arts-based strands, which will focus on the currency theme and result in a collection of exhibited and/or published work. The programme is framed around Zamyn's cultural analysis methodology.  It will encourage exploration of the representations and motifs, emerging across a spectrum of artistic practices, which relate to the theme of currency and the interaction between culture and the financial markets.

Theme: Currency
'Although the notion of currency is usually associated with the financial system of a given society, its scope is far wider, encompassing not only financial units of exchange but created objects, ideas and even desires. Currency in this broader sense determines the form of human transactions. If one currency holds, others must be converted into it or evaluated in relation to it. With the currency of ideas, for example, if one style of thinking does not use the dominant currency, then it will have fewer possibilities of finding expression and dissemination. And this will have effects at the most basic level of human communication. Currency here controls the range and, significantly, the content of transactions. Despite its power, currency systems are often invisible to us. Practices in art, in cultural theory and in psychoanalysis can at times render invisible currencies visible and allow us to study them and think through their consequences. We can try to gauge not only what the parameters of a currency system consist of but also what eludes it, what resists being subsumed and subjected to networks of exchange.'
Click here to read the full paper.

Further information about the programme will be added to this page as it progresses.